Re: Sod the clock - @ I Am Spartacus

"WHAT - A public train service makes a profit?? COME ON NETWORK SOUTHEAST - Get your act together, and find out how!!!!"

I'll tell you how: On 2010-ish data, Swiss Railways income is 25% above the combined UK rail industry's income (that's gross revenues per passenger km). I've not adjusted for freight traffic because ICBA, but my fag packet calculations suggest that would actually increase the difference by a few per cent.

So if you want Swiss style railways, no problem, we do know how it is done, and it involves paying out 25% more than at present. With UK government rail support to the tune of about a third of the total, to raise 25% of gross revenues through fare and freight increases would require the rail user to see a circa 35% increase on tickets.

Go sell that one to Network Southeast's punters!

Re: what do you expect them to do@DanDanDan

"You can't tax sales, that's ridiculous"

Of course you can. Petrol, fags, booze have punitive sales taxes added, and most items are subject to VAT; property has stamp duty charged. In the case of VAT these costs are mostly reclaimable by all except the retail customer, but the other taxes usually aren't. Arguably personal income tax is simply a sales tax on the sale of your labour to an employer.

A sales tax where avoidance of corporation taxes is clear is a damn good idea, and could even be simplified by tweaking the rules on VAT to make it reclaimable except in those circumstances. Somebody will now say "you can't do that because" but there's already situations where companies can't reclaim VAT, usually of a fairly technical nature (for example certain retail loan administration costs).

What is lacking here is (as usual) the political will to take a problem, and fix it. Grandstanding on a palrliamentary committee is a nice bit of fun, but this shower aren't accountable for anything, and I can't see that flea-brain Osborne fixing this ever.

Re: Totally agree.

"So what do you expect them to do - just ignore it?"

No, what I expect them to do is copy the practice, and that's exactly what Margaret Hodge's family company Stemcor does. UK revenues of £2.1bn, and paid taxes equating to 0.01% of those revenues. Good socialist values Margaret! Not that the rest of the Westminster leeches of any political persuasion are any better.

Remember, fellow commentards, having the one job and paying your fair share of tax applies to us, not them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businesslatestnews/9668396/Margaret-Hodges-family-company-pays-just-0.01pc-tax-on-2.1bn-of-business-generated-in-the-UK.html

Re: What the West should be doing...

"But local robots are cheaper still. In both the latter cases unemployment rises, but in the latter case, money is clawed back through local taxes and less money going abroad."

How will money be clawed back locally, given that there will be fewer and fewer people in employment to pay for the product, generating revenues and taxable profits for the makers?

In some utopian future we might need some means of sharing out machine generated wealth amongst a largely idle population (not that the "idle consumer" model has worked terribly well in the oil rich Gulf states), but in the transitional phase that we appear to be approaching there's going to be a lot of difficulty as some people have to work, and an increasing number do not. The UK is one of the most de-industrialised societies in the world, but even we've found that services don't make up the gap, nor do welfare payments make for a balanced society.

Re: "isn't not"

That's called a "typo". But good of you to raise this important point - slack day at the ranch?

Re: And the USA wonders why @Matt Bryant

I call Godwin.

The rest of your spittle frothed invective doesn't really merit a response, but can I ask why do you let yourself down like this? Sometimes you're capable of reasoned thought and make good contributions, but only the other week you made an ass of yourself in a discussion with h4rmony, in exactly the same manner as you have here, spiralling down to abuse when you don't seem to be getting the better of the argument. It's not the name calling that I mind - I can do that when I choose, and I'm not posting under my given name - but that you're cr@pping on your own lawn needlessly.

All of us are wrong sometimes, but I find it better to slink away quietly on those (hopefully) rare occasions that I mess up - you might want to try that.

Re: And the USA wonders @solidsoup

"in large part you owe your high standard of living to those who play these shadow games for the benefit and well-being of our countries and citizens"

I think you watch too much TV, or are daft enough to believe what your government tell you - probably the latter judging by your emotive language. The standards of living in the UK, Europe, and the US are down to the rule of law and hard work, and the material threat from third world hell holes is minimal (and that threat is increased by the shadow wars, interventions and provocations of the West). Even if every claimed terror threat that the bearded loones have attempted had delivered a "successful" attack, the impact would be substantially less than most countries kill in car crashes in a week. The UK, you may remember, faced an active terrorist threat from Irish terrorists for twenty years without materially affecting our standard of living. But of course that was actively sponsored and supported by the Yanks, who did nothing to close down scum like Noraid, and precious little to intercept weapons, and deliberately refused to return fugitive terrorists. Funny how you lot became all serious about selected forms of terrorism when Bin Laden sent a calling card.

I'd agree that Stuxnet is part of a shadow war, but lets be clear about who initiated cyber warfare, and legitamised its use in peace time. Interesting to note that only now, four years after they commissioned these acts of agression, are Western governments starting to worry about the threat to their own infrastructure. Do you really call that working for our benefit and well-being? I call that a shocking lack of preparation, and akin to invading a country without any clue or plan for what you're going to do when you've won the war.

Re: better dead than red

"Picking up the slack" implies that there's a necessary role in starting random wars in poor countries. Do feel free to start the next one on your own, because I've seen enough servicemen's funerals in the name of no good cause.

In fact, despite a family background in the military, and having worked myself on military systems, I think that the British government NOT having the means to engage in misguided wars is probably a good thing. You Yanks should try it.

Mea culpa: Yeah, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls.

Re: It's a start Oh no it's not!

"Choose sectors we can be good at, and stuff them with money. Then we might just be able to compete."

Yeah. The government picking the winners and backing them. A long history of success in that idea. Remember Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology"? BAe was one of the end results of the government backing winning sectors like aerospace. And as a result we can't even built entire aircraft ourselves, unlike (say) Sweden, France, Germany etc. Or nuclear power - a glorious and long history of vast state investment, subsidies and support, but our next generation of reactors will be designed in Japan or the US.

Government have already decided that "green" tech is a place for us to be future winners, and they've stuffed that with subsidies, but have a look at who makes the stuff, and where they make it. Again, we're not in the running.

Something's wrong, badly wrong, but expecting government to sort it out by choosing winners and investing in them is madness.

Re: FFS Leave him alone!

Go on then, tell us what public interest will be served, or what aspect of justice will be achieved by prosecuting him?

He's been punished more than enough by being hounded for a fucking decade by a vindictive foreign state for a crime that at the time had a penalty of about £500 fine in the UK. As with the Wikileaks affair, the Yanks are getting on their uppers not because any material harm has been done, but because they have been embarrassed as a result of their failure to properly secure their own systems. Personally, I don't want yet more public money wasted on this affair.

Re: I Struggle

"I Struggle.. to work out what's actually wrong with this initiative."

What's wrong is that the starting point is wrong, in an assumption by government that all (or a lot of) our critical infrastructure is cobbled on to the internet with no more security than a password of "password", and a user ID of "admin". I'm sure there's more than a few instances of dodgy security, but the implied threat is largely fictitious, like most of the things government work bravely and tirelessly to save us from.

However, to appoint BAe (involved in every major defence overspend and procurement failure in the past forty years) to give advice on this is not going to end well. The consultants will undoubtedly come up with a series of recommendations with a high cost, to be paid by you through your utility bills, but in reality offering no material advantage to your security.

All of this "cyber security" claptrap is being parroted by a government that has virtually no IT or science expertise amongst its MPs (or civil servants, if we judge by results), and you can be sure that BIS or whoever will have drawn a narrow remit that precludes any bigger picture application of common sense. So you might feel happy that the electricity companies are going to be paying for BAe's expertise, but what do you think National Grid's IT bods have been doing all these years? Even then, the physical threat remains, so that you could for example bring down the power grid to the entire south east of England with a handful of well placed devices, and in a manner that would take weeks to resolve.

We certainly do need to keep in mind the threat of systems intrusion and electronic attack, but the limited success of Stuxnet with the backing of the largest and smartest world technology power, and the delivery by the world's most effective spying, intelligence and sabotage power (Israel) shows that the whole cyber warfare risk is over-rated.

Re: Hmm

Come El Reg, make an FOI request for how they have arrived at this daft number.

Re: More rules = more loopholes, idiots.

"The government taxes as much as it can from everyone and then spends accordingly."

If only that were true. I'm sorry to break this one to you, but the government spend regardless of how much they get in taxes, and that's why this country's national debt is now somewhere around £1.2 trillion, all of which has to be serviced until it can be inflated away. Half of that is down to two men, Brown and Blair, who should be tortured in a humourous manner and then burnt at the stake for their reckless and traitorous incompetence (noting that Cameron and Osbourne are no better).

Re: Ban international companies.@James Micallef

"Just remove ALL exceptions / exemptions, remove the difference between corporate and private rates, and remove the difference between tax on earned income, capital gains, private equity etc."

Yes, that'd be an excellent idea as well. Kill employer's NIC, and "climate change levies" and all other taxes on employment, and we're starting to get somewhere. I think non-reclaimable VAT would still be needed to stop tax tourism, but between us there's the making of a strong, easily understood tax system.

Re: So cancel corporation tax@hollymcr

I think you misunderstand how the idea of stopping VAT being reclaimable could work. I agree it is currently intended to be reclaimable through the B2B value chain, and thus only paid by the final retail user, but it doesn't need to be in certain exceptional circumstances, like tax dodging globo-corps. That doesn't mean that non-reclaimable VAT leads to a rise in prices.

The companies' asking price is set by what they think the market will take. If Starbucks can't reclaim their VAT because they are a bunch of tax dodging thieves, that doesn't automatically inflate their price (in exactly the same way, have you noticed that their coffee is priced more cheaply at the till because they currently dodge UK taxes? Thought not). If Starbucks were unable to reclaim VAT, they could try and increase their retail price accordingly but customers can then save 20% by going to Costa, or they can choose to pay the extra, and effectively pay Starbucks corporate tax bill on their behalf. The same applies in a B2B context, that Google's prices to business advertisers only change if Google wish to, in reality the market wouldn't accept a 20% hike in rates.

Re: Ban international companies.

There are already plenty of rules on transfer pricing, as this is called, intended to stop this. But as the tax code becomes ever more complex (around 10,000 pages int he UK now), the easier it has become to find a loophole. F*ckwit politicians make this systematically worse by signing up to complex and ill understood agreements that sometimes work and sometimes don't. So due to international trade agreements we let in bazillions of quids worth of Chinese goods, they buy next to nothing from us, and there's very little manufacturing left in this country - that's a bad outcome. We (around El Reg) weep, rend our clothes and gnash our teeth about offshoring of jobs to India, but actually we have a trade balance with India that is (shock, horror) fairly well balanced - that is a good outcome, even if we don't like some of the detail.

In this case, our snivel servants and corrupt pols believe they need to kow-tow to European free trade rules that their predecessors signed up to. Obviously nobody signed up believing that these rules would enable Yank corporations to dodge all local taxes, but I shan't hold me breath for anybody in Westminster sorting this out, least of all Spineless Dave.

Re: So cancel corporation tax@ David Webb

So make VAT reclaimability based on paying an appropriate level of corporation tax, or having a valid excuse for not declaring a profit and paying tax (eg startups, genuinely exceptional losses). It really is that simple. And no offsets or witholding element, so that anybody trying to do tax tourism ends up paying both countries tax.

At the moment the complete w@nkers at HMRC will hound me to death's door over submitting a f***ing tax return (even when all my income is through PAYE), but when Google tell them "sorry, made no UK profits on our UK revenues of $4bn, we're just operating here as an act of charity", the HMRC tw@ts go, "oh, alright then", and go back to polishing their pension statements.

Re: Is it just me?

"Or is Apple getting bitchslapped from every direction?"

They've lost a few, won a few. In this legal warfare, Apple (sitting on around $100 billion of cash) reason that they can afford to pay the lawyer more so than most other companies. Google "only" has $40 billion, but that's plenty enough to stay in the game. But what Apple can do by this approach is to frighten off the small fry, and the financially weak, and that's a win for them. People like RIM will have to worry about BB10 and future devices - "are we at risk of being sued by Apple?" will be a bigger concern than "does it work?". Apple also have the corporate management resource to do this. Other cost constrained companies don't have the management overhead to control multi-billion dollar legal budgets, or to develop offensive strategies based on lawyers as troops.

Where Apple is losing from this, now that's more interesting, because it's not the legal fees. There's recently been the first ever drop in the proportion of iPhone owners intending to have an iPhone next time round - still very high levels of satisfaction that anybody else would envy, but perhaps a tipping point. Fanbois aside, nobody is really impressed with the iPhone5. They've stumbled with IOS6 and with the maps fiasco. They've been caught out "borrowing without permission" with regard to Swiss Railways. The latest iPad isn't really much of an advance on the last one. The walled garden is starting to grate with some (but not all users). And throwing their weight around, and their childish demeanour is starting to damage their reputation with customers.

When you think what Apple is good at, it's not patent trolling or litigation - there's companies who do that for a living and are good at it. It is good at product development of shiny, innovative, polished yet easy to use products. Or rather, it was good at these things under the great dictator. Under Cook there's been nothing that really looks novel, and they now spend more on lawyers than on product development. With progressively declining reasons to upgrade generation on generation, their high end, high margin market is at risk of slowing, unless emerging markets offset a flattening market in the developed world (and even then, that merely buys a couple of years). I think Apple's position as the world's most valuable company looks like a high water moment, from which the tide is going to go out, unless they can innovate something pretty spectacular, but with the boardroom intent on keeping lawyers employed rather than technologists and product developers, what are the chances?

Re: 5th Nov@Lee Dowling

A- "Lee writes lucidly, with speed and authority, but he must learn to be more concise"

Re: Android Fanbois@Regulator-RICHTO

"you all as android fans cannot accept the fact there actually might be a good 3rd alternative to a smartphone device"

Most of us would concede that WP8 will be a competent phone OS. And most of us expect it to become the third man. The problem is that there's not going to be much money gained by pushing in as a latecomer who (and this is the critical bit) offers nothing new. To be undifferentiated in a market of three, now there's an achievement.

Being "good" isn't enough. I won't buy a WP phone even though it probably is quite good. I won't buy it because it doesn't offer anything new, it comes with an interface that looks poor to my eyes, and MS (and key partner) Nokia have a poor record of running away from their customers, leaving unsupported or not quite finished software.

And MS's refusal to offer a proper desktop version of Windows 8, despite clear communication from consumers proves that this is a company that still doesn't care about its customers.

Re: How long before

"Seems they are much more interested in the money than creativity."

Lucky for us that the young George Lucas was solely dedicated to high art, then. Imagine if he'd wasted his talent with a series of trashy sci-fi films, woodenly acted, and accompanied by endless merchandising?

Re: Finally! @hplasm

A step forwards for E.ON and RWE, who sold a few fields to Hitachi for £700m, having paid less than half of that in the first place. Because the Horizon JV was not looking to use the Hitachi plant, nothing that the JV did in terms of planning or approvals will have any transferrability to Hitachi's proposals. By my reckoning this adds £0.4bn to the outturn price of any reactors eventually built, before anybody has even started to design or plan anything. Smooth..

To overpay by this amount suggests that Hitachi don't have a clue, which is a bit worrying for us plebs, since they're going to have to recover these costs through the electricity bill, and our equally clueless politicians and even more clueless civil servants are busy working to ensure that our power bills go up by whatever ti takes to buy DECC's toys.

@ A J Stiles

"We ran out of coal,"

Oi! There's around 860 billion tonnes of known coal reserves worldwide, mostly excluding subsea formations that would probably treble that number, and noting that there's large tracts of the planet where nobody has bothered to look for coal.

I'll put this in capitals because you're missing it: THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF HYDROCARBON FOSSIL FUELS. What there is a declining reserve of cheap to produce, convenient to handle forms of hydrocarbon, in particular light crude oil. That's probably more than offset for a few decades by the increasing reserves (ie we're finding it faster than we're using it) of gas, where there's currently around 200 trillion cubic metres of gas reserves, with probably a lot more in the form of shale gas that isn't currently classified in the reserves. Remaining oil reserves are going to be more expensive to produce (eg deep sea and sub-salt reserves), and more difficult to use cleanly and efficiently (for example oil sands), but this idea of "running out tomorrow" is not correct. In the next decade some Gulf Coperation Council countries will begin to stop exporting oil (due to rising domestic use and falling output) and there will then be total panic over Peak Oil, and the idea of "running out of oil" will become a mainstream belief, but it's essentially incorrect.

Even when that lot has been exhausted there's trillions of tonnes of hydrocarbons left, in the shape of gas hydrates and oil and tar shales, none of which can be extracted economically at present (and we'd need new technologies, not just price rises to be able to do that.

So, fossil fuels - finite, but plenty around. Costs going to rise as we've used the good quality cheap stuff first, and on both counts makes sense to develop renewables. But the cost of renewables needs to fall, and we need to fix the energy storage problem. Sadly the UK is doing very, very little on developing energy storage (compared to say the US or Germany). Meanwhile, instead of proper science and engineering research into energy storage the UK government fritters our research budget on more and more studies by geographers and other pseudo-scientists to prove that climate change is going to kill us all.